Digressions&Impressions

Socratic Politics and Political Theory

“Then, if that is his chief concern,” he said, “he will not willingly take part in politics.” “Yes, by the dog” said I, “in his own city he certainly will, yet perhaps not in the city of his birth, except in some providential conjuncture.” “I understand,” he said; “you mean the city whose establishment we have described, the city whose home is in the ideal for I think that it can be found nowhere on earth.” “Well,” said I, “perhaps there is a pattern of it laid up in heaven for him who wishes to contemplate it and so beholding to constitute himself its citizen. But it makes no difference whether it exists now or ever will come into being. The politics of this city only will be his and of none other.”--Plato Republic,  592ab

At the end of Book 9 of the Republic, in the quoted passage, Socrates distances himself, and thus (I stipulate) the philosopher, from the possibility of political rule and even participation in active political reform (or revolution). In fact, at first sight it seems he accepts an a-political role. In a way this is no surprise, because throughout the Republic, the role of philosophy and expertise in a political community is (to use an ugly word) problematized. (I tend to call this the Socratic Problem in my own research.)

Instead, if we allow that Socrates is an exemplar, he offers two philosophical tasks: (i) ongoing theoretical exploration of ideal theories that are humanly possible, but unavailable given the near-impossibility to solve the transition problem from any present status quo to getting up and running; (ii) the practice of private self-governance--what we would call the art of living well.

On (i), I use the plural because while undeniably the (the divinely crafted) heavenly pattern is univocal (597c), the human models inspired by, and their inner relations, can be multiple. I have two arguments for this claim: first, Socrates discusses two such models in the Republic; the true city (372e) also known as "the city of pigs" (369b-372d)) and the luxurious city (372e-451b). Second, the human models will -- because they are constituted in and explored by the understanding (διανοίᾳ) -- all rely on (partially) empirical axioma (and not purely intellectual, univocal eternal truths); that means that there will be room for variation. (511) The latter point is non-trivial because it follows that one can be practicing Socratic political theory about ideal theory without adopting the details of either of the Republic's cities as long as they are, somehow patterned on the heavenly pattern;* it is an open question if anybody else has practiced Socratic political theory about ideal theory, (but through some of my blogs I have hinted this may be true for Bacon, More, Thoreau, and Adam Smith).

On (ii) unlike contemporary new age, quietest practices in 'the art of living well,' Socrates's private self-governance is intrinsically political because the emendation is (as it were) patterned on, and oriented toward, the heavenly political city. (It also engages in ongoing speculative political theory.) But the expression of this politics is curtailed.

Even so, Socrates leaves us with the question if his activities in the Athenian market-place fall under this practice of self-government. If so, then (ii) involves considerable 'public' activity that has non-trivial 'political' consequences (including reformist, revolutionary, and reactionary). If not, then it is possible to see them as falling under (i); yet, as is well known these activities do impact his hometown. (And then we're dealing with a form of irony.) But, if his activities in the market-place fall neither under (i) nor under (ii), it is worth asking how to understand them at all.

 

On Slavery in the Republic

“First, in the matter of making slaves of the defeated, do you think it right for Greeks to reduce Greek cities to slavery, or rather that so far as they are able, they should not suffer any other city to do so, but should accustom Greeks [469c] to spare Greeks, foreseeing the danger of enslavement by the barbarians?” “Sparing them is wholly and altogether the better,” said he. “They are not, then, themselves to own Greek slaves, either, and they should advise the other Greeks not to?” “By all means,” he said; “at any rate in that way they would be more likely to turn against the barbarians and keep their hands from one another.”--Plato, Republic 5. 469b-c (Shorey translation).

Twice during the past week [here and here], I have claimed that there are no slaves in the 'true city' (true city (372e)) or "city of pigs") in Plato's Republic (Socrates' first city in speech  (369b-372d)). I believe it matters because it contains the Socratic normative baseline or model/exemplar [or Weberian ideal type] by which to judge and evaluate other political regimes. This baseline is surprisingly close to Smith's system of natural liberty (which is anti-slavery) in quite a few other respects.  As Brian Calvert emphasizes in his (1987) paper, in that city there would be nothing to do for slaves because wage laborers "complete" the city (371d-e). I offer a further argument for this conclusion below.

Mary-Hannah Jones, a former colleague at Wesleyan and a very talented Plato scholar, insisted in comments on these posts that my claim went against an important strain in the scholarly literature (where there was once a lively debate ovser slavery in Plato's Republic, although Vlastos is thought to have settled it in 1968). And indeed, I agree with Popper (who makes very fine points on this issue), and as Vlastos argued persuasively, that in the luxurious city there are slaves (as he notes 433D settles this). These slaves are non-Greeks, the spoil of battle victory. I agree with Calvert that they are a discordant note in this city, but that's further evidence that in this city immoderate desires are not fully checked. (This is also clear from the fact that there has to be an official law that encourages public hypocrisy in the way affection is displayed among older lovers of young boys [403b]).+

But does it follow, then, as Vlastos seem to assume almost tacitly, that there also slaves in the true city? While I hesitate to disagree with Vlastos on Plato interpretation, I think he is wrong (as suggested above). For the true city is pacific and designed to avoid wars of conquest and to be a prey of conquerors because of the lack of luxury (372b-c). So, it follows that in addition there being no reason to have slaves there, there will also be no supply of new slaves (neither Greek nor Barbarian) to tempt the development of the institution. Vlastos completely misses this point.*

I close with two observations. First, Vlastos could have accepted my conclusion because he does not really take the true city seriously, and certainly does not consider it the normative, political ideal. In fact, in his paper, he anachronistically calls the citizens of the luxurious city "utopians" (293ff).  I don't object to anachronism as such, by the way (although it ignores a lot of differences between the luxurious city and the citizens of More's imagined island, Utopia).

To be clear, second, Plato's Socrates never develops, it seems, a sustained moral critique of slavery and there is plenty of evidence that Plato accepts the institution as a de facto part of Greek political life. (I say 'sustained' because in the Meno and in the exchange with Polemarchus, the slave-holder is revealed to be base in non-trivial ways.) But as I noted, unlike Aristotle's conception of human nature, Socrates' anthropology of the true city offers no reason to think there are natural slaves, and even the more complex, and, indeed, hierarchical conception of human nature developed in the luxurious city, leaves, as Calvert notes, no obvious room for slaves by nature or, to use that more Aristotelian phrase, second nature.

 

On Continental Philosophy as Cultural Capital

Reports of the death of the analytic/continental divide are highly premature, and the rampant claims that this division is "merely sociological" seem to imply (in rather un-Latourian fashion) that sociology deals only with figments of the imagination.--Harman on  Latour, p. 11.

During my last visit to the pre-renovation-era Stedelijk, I attended a friend's wedding in 2002. As it happens it was also the last time I got really plastered at a party because I had falsely assumed dinner would be served at the event. The wedding was an artsy affair because the bride (an editor/writer) and groom (a journalist) had lots of friends and family who were musicians and (Protestant) clergy.  At the time the museum was still controlled by the municipality and private parties were not permitted; but somebody close to the wedding-couple knew a curator. I vividly remember a solitary walk through the darkened, then-still-slightly-shabby museum with an extended meditation on Van Dongen's Anna de Noailles. (I had no idea then she was was a famous artist in her day.)

Yesterday, we went to see the 'Matisse and his friends' exhibit (as I call it) in Het Stedelijk with our son. I was surprised there were fewer crowds than its neighbors (Het Rijks and Het Van Gogh) attracts; we had no wait to enter the exhibit. The expanded building feels very clean.

When I was a kid, there had been obligatory, school-visits to local museums. At most of these, I was more fascinated by other visitors, especially the earnest art-students with their drawing pads who would patiently copy the paintings on the wall, than by the art works on display. But, at Het Stedelijk, I was mesmerized, even frightened, by Edward Kienholz's The Beanery. To this day, when I see a mechanical clock I recall -- by the magic of association -- that installation; and sometimes when I walk into a dive, I encounter clock-heads before my brain tells me I am wrong.

At the end of our visit, we went to the gift-shop to buy a Matisse-post-card. To my surprise, the fancy store had an excellent and broad selection of books in twentieth century (Continental) aesthetics, critical theory, and Continental philosophy more broadly--all attractively displayed in the gift-store. The only analytical philosopher in sight was Danto. I was bemused to see so much once-radical-chic assimilated to a tasteful, bourgeois environment.

But as I reflected on the book display, with my finger-tips sensually caressing the elegantly designed covers, I recognized that these densely argued, jargon-rich books were expected to sell. There is evidently a market for this kind of philosophical elitism--one associated with the twentieth century avant-garde and conceptual art. When I was an undergraduate, and even a PhD student, I was assured, always in passing, over and over again, that Continental philosophy is bullshit and rubbish; that its jargon masked the empty rhetoric of charlatans; of course, I was also repeatedly told that Heidegger was a Nazi (recall, and here). (Nobody ever seemed to notice that if Continental philosophy was fully implicated in Nazism it was the opposite of empty rhetoric.)

The gift-shop, which is managed, at least in part, by the up-market German artsy-chain, Buchhandlung Walther König, offers Lacan, Zizek, Sloterdijk, Butler, Arendt, Deleuze, Badiou, etc. (I even saw a book by Sylvère Lotringer for the first time.) Evidently, Continental philosophy is either status-enhancing and, thus value-added to the art-replicas, post-cards, and glossy catalogs on display in the store, or it is, by now, firmly associated with modern art and part of the same market. I looked around me. I saw several people picking up books and heading toward the cash register. (I bought Harman on Latour.) I scrutinized their faces; I didn't think they were buying these books to be displayed on coffee-tables alongside the heavy-glossy, Works of Brancussi. I wondered how large the public was that would seek out the challenge of grappling with continental philosophers during the holidays.

Whenever analytical philosophers make a public impact, I feel a kind of Humean pride, even when I know I ought to feel better. In Holland several of my former teachers -- Dennett, Nussbaum, etc. -- are TV personalities, and whenever they are featured this pleases me greatly (even if I disagree with their utterances). I don't feel the same emotion when I encounter media attention for Continental philosophers (except, of course, my NewAPPS buddies). In fact, in looking over the book-store display, I felt a soft-jealousy. 

In practice, analytical philosophy is slowly displacing continental philosophy in the modern, grant-driven university research environment of the European Continent; the grant agencies focus on public utility, objective metrics, and embrace a veneer of scientism. We have become little cogs that push the scientific research frontier along. Carnap's bet was prescient.

In much of Europe we are now a generation or two removed from Christianity, and philosophy's role as a secular placeholder -- in the manner of 19th century aesthetic experience as a secular placeholder for religious experience -- of creative theology and public prophecy is fading; the last gasp of such theology can be found in the Stedelijk's rooms devoted to high conceptual or minimal art of the 1980s (e.g. Sol Lewitt). It is, thus, no surprise that the best Continental philosophy is not emanating from Paris anymore. It's Americans or those that lived Marxism that re-fuel it until, perhaps, our newer immigrant populations re-animate the tradition.

As we left the museum, I regret failing to introduce my son to Kienholz's The Beanery.

On Rawls and Esotericism

A more far-reaching example concerns John Rawls…A new study of his thought has shown when his A Theory of Justice (1971) is read in conjunction with his later Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy (2000), as well as an unpublished manuscript containing notes for eighteen lectures on Kant and Hegel, it becomes clear that important elements of his theory derive from an elaborate and profound engagement with the thought of Hegel. But while Rawls’s enormous debts to Kant are well-known because amply elaborated in A Theory of Justice, his similar debts to Hegel – was something of a pariah in most analytic philosophy departments of that time – are virtually unknown because completely suppressed. In the six-hundred odd pages of the original edition of A Theory of Justice, there are only two fleeting mentions of his name. It would seem that, fearing the disapproval or at least the noncomprehension of his primary audience, Rawls remained silent about an intellectual relationship that is ultimately crucial for the full understanding of his thought. Needless to say, this limited act of concealment does not rise to the level of full-blown esotericism. The point, however, is that this forceful and high-minded moral philosopher, who was already safely ensconced at  Harvard, was nevertheless moved to take a real step in the direction of esotericism by conditions of “adversity” that fell very far short of genuine censorship or persecution. Once you open your eyes to it, in short, you discover that defensive esotericism is so natural a phenomenon that even in the extremely open and tolerant environments of modern liberal democracies you still come across traces of it with surprising frequency.-- Arthur M. Melzer, Philosophy Between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Writing, 135. [HT Norma Thompson]

While I was preparing a post on Transformative Experience and Rawls, Scholar.google alerted me to the citation of my first adult publication on Hume's and Smith's friendship in Arnhart's perceptive, critical review of Melzer's book; Arnhart is also critical of Straussianism more generally. (I have never met Arnhart, and I was very pleased by his use of my work in criticism of Straussianism (recall).) Alerted by Thompson's review, I checked Melzer's book online for the treatment of Rawls, which I copied out above. In his footnote to the quoted passage, Melzer cites a Columbia dissertation by Margaret Meek Lange and a German book by Schaub; I was unable  to locate either (but will keep looking).+

What to make of Melzer's interpretation of Rawls?

First, liberal democracies can also generate circumstances of persecution; Rawls lived through wartime censorship during the Second World War and the McCarthy era. George Reisch's scholarship has revealed that the Cold War inhibited public engagement by analytic philosophers (in fact, he credits Rawls with re-starting analytical philosophy's renewed engagement). A Theory of Justice was written during the polarization of the Vietnam war which generated its own censorship practices and fault-lines even at Harvard (recall this post on Railton). Moreover, as Melzer correctly notes, analytical philosophy was (and is) not hospitable to some intellectual enterprises (although the targets can shift--recall this post on Priest). It is, therefore, not silly to explore to what degree such facts shaped Rawls's presentation.++ Having said that, Melzer, who writes in an age of Snowden and Wikileaks, seems a bit too eager to flatter ("extremely open and tolerant environments of modern liberal democracies") some of his intended readers.

Second, one important legacy of Rawls on analytical philosophy -- one pointed out to me by Charles Larmore -- is his citation practices (obviously Larmore shouldn't be held responsible for my other ways of approaching Rawls). Whereas Oxbridge (recall) had taught analytical philosophers to do away with most footnotes (if you didn't know whose positions were being discussed obliquely you didn't belong in the game anyway), Rawls created a sense of community by including sources and critics alike into the conversation from the generous Preface onward (with self-critical footnotes on omitted references). It does not follow, of course, from this fact that Rawls would cite everybody and everything that matters to his development or that he would not practice some forms of "suppression," but it is odd to overlook this feature of Rawls (I return to this below).

Third, as a general rule one should be cautious in reading Rawls's later Lectures back into A Theory of Justice; it should especially be avoided as a means toward discovering his "debts" to earlier sources. These Lectures have many aims (including one that Rawls does not mention: the formation of a remarkably cohesive and institutionally successful school), but the least of these is to help the student and scholars retrace Rawls's sources for A Theory of Justice. (Here's one bit of evidence: Rawls effaces his knowledge of the economists--Knight is deleted from the story, and economics is treated as an enterprise distinct from philosophy (recall).)

Fourth, on p. 314 note 16, of A Theory of Justice, Rawls tells the attentive reader (while discussing Arrow and Knight) to "see the footnotes" in Arrow and Knight on particular pages. So, Rawls's note is modest evidence that Rawls is not stating explicitly all that he thinks is relevant in the pages of A Theory of Justice. These notes do, in fact, call attention to further historical sources for Arrow and Knight, and, perhaps, too, Rawls, and help explain the way the intellectual landscape is understood. (Some other time I'll say something about Knight's notes.) In particular, in his notes, Arrow mentions Rousseau and Milton in the context of discussing the 'Idealist' tradition (which in Arrow's presentation also includes Kant and T.H. Green.)** (I return to this footnote in the sixth and final point below.)

Fifth, Hegel clearly matters to Rawls of the Lectures, and I have no doubt he wants his student-audience to understand A Theory of Justice alongside Hegel. We know that Rawls owned and read Hegel's Philosophy of Right in German in a 1955 edition.*** So it is not impossible that Hegel was a very important source to Rawls in the sixties (after all, he cites him in English translation in A Theory of Justice). Rawls is confident enough to insist in a footnote that Hegel, in turn, is indebted to Smith's Wealth of Nations. But A Theory of Justice also calls attention to sources heavily influenced by and engaging with Hegel: in addition to Knight, Marx and Bradley deserve mention. Moreover, we know that Rawls had carefully read Bosanquet, Kelsen, and Schumpeter, and he owned the great Christian Liberal Idealist, Green (with whom Rawls has considerable affinity).

Finally, already in the original preface to A Theory of Justice, Rawls had made it clear that he understood that not all readers could grapple with his "long book" in the same way. He provides several road-maps (which allow one to taste the "essentials of the theory" and the "basic parts of the book" (xviii-xix). Rawls distinguishes among his readers in virtue of them having different conceptions of freedom to follow their "preferences and to look at the problems which most concern" them (xix). This hint shows that Rawls thought himself capable of writing for a heterogeneous audience. In fact, and surprisingly enough, the hint entails that Rawls thought his most careful or patient reader(s) were those most willing and capable to suspend acting on their preferences (self-command). We learn from the part of the book that Rawls tells his reader is safe to skip that "the morality of self-command... becomes truly supererogatory when the individual displays its characteristic virtues of courage, magnanimity, and self-control in actions presupposing great discipline and training" in the service of "superior ends in a manner consistent with justice." (419)

 

 

On Being a Hypocrite; or on True Teaching

I could swagger about Fortitude and the Contempt of Riches as much as Seneca himself.---Mandeville, Fable of the Bees (recall).

Far different is the purpose of those who are speech-making and trying to win the approbation of a throng of hearers, far different that of those who allure the ears of young men and idlers by many sided or fluent argumentation; philosophy teaches us to act, not to speak; it exacts of every one that he should live according to his own law [facere docet philosophia, non dicere, et hoc exigit, ut ad legem suam quisque vivat, ne orationi vita dissentiat vel ipsa inter se vita], that his life should not be out of harmony with his words, and that, further, there is unity to the color of one's actions [unus sit omnium actio num color].  This, I say, is the highest duty and the highest proof of wisdom, - that deed and word should be in accord, that a man should be equal to himself under all conditions, and always the same.--Seneca, Letter XX (slightly modified translation).

I am no stranger to falling short of my personal ideals (recall) and know plenty of well-established professional philosophers who are moralistic yet routinely exhibit lack of basic decency. I know extremely kind and generous folk who advocate hardship and worse for less articulate and connected others (in the name of utility, good governance, etc.). I know courageous advocates of civic liberties who fail their students by their incapacity at sublimating intellectual eros. So I did not expect it to find it so difficult to continue my series on Seneca's Letters and write about Letter XX in which Seneca addresses the discord between words and actions (and, thus, extends the theme of Letter XIX, recall). Given that Seneca is notorious for the mismatch between words and deeds, it is tempting to read this letter as Seneca's Apologia Pro Vita Sua addressing the known criticisms of his activities under Nero in which he grew rich in the service of a tyrant.

Upon extended reflection: the key to the letter is the implied distinction between being a teacher and being a philosopher (aka being wise and, explicitly, being great-souled [ingentis animi est]). Seneca identifies himself as a teacher not as a philosopher. He teaches, not unlike Plato [and unlike Nietzsche], in part, by pointing away toward proper exemplars (e.g., Demetrius the Cynic) and by drawing on Epicurean themes. Such exemplars have a three-fold function: (a) they offer an existence-proof that a comportment with integrity, that is, a harmony between right action and words, is humanly possible; (b) he holds up exemplars to be emulated (recall my treatment of Letter 5); (c) it allows him to deflect, in part, the charge of hypocrisy--for he very clearly implies that he falls short of the comportment with integrity while not being so corrupted (by the axiology of the marketplace/public [recall Letter 14]) that he cannot recognize true wisdom in others.

More important, from (c) it follows that (d) Seneca thinks he can bypass the more fundamental version of Meno's paradox (see Abe Stone); he can teach some virtue to Lucilius without being fully virtuous himself in a context where, as he implies, ordinary social institutions do not facilitate even such limited virtue. We may even add that Seneca shows some wisdom by recognizing his own limitations not only in light of exacting pure standards of integrity, but also in light of available human instantiations. (It is, thus, important that Demetrius is not merely a mythical or historical figure.)

So, Seneca knows he falls short of and he does not hold himself up as the standard for comportment with integrity. Thus the traditional charge against Seneca is (somewhat) misguided. Seneca may even hint that he knows intimately what he is warning against (do as I say, not as I did) and, thereby, (against Deleuze's protests) become a better teacher for some pupils (say, ambitious types like Lucilius). It is, after all, by no means obvious that Demetrius un-mediated by, say, a Seneca would be recognized as wise by an untutored pupil. Sincerity of even the noblest expressions does not guarantee moral approval, after all.

Ever since Socrates's trial we know that students' actions can reflect badly on the quality and reputation of their teachers' activities. Seneca embraces this fact--again, like Plato who shows us some of Socrates's more disastrous teaching methods (that's compatible with admiration of Socrates). So, it turns out, that Seneca is closer to the modern university professor than one might initially have thought. Like most of us, he is no holy man, and he does not expect to be evaluated as one.

Rather, Seneca correctly expects to be evaluated, in part, on the consequences of his teaching on his pupils (that is, the addressee and other, later readers of his Letters) and the societies their actions help shape. This is no eternal moral-get-out-of-jail-free-pass. Rather (at least late in life) Seneca embraces that he lives by a rather demanding standard that in addition to complex skills requires considerable luck (recall) and turns each of our teaching and writing lives into trials in which we are judged, fairly (with satire) or not, as causes of unknown (and potentially extended) multiplicity of effects (recall).* We may, then even say -- echoing Spinoza (Ethics 1p36 [recall]) -- that Seneca claims there is true glory [mea enim gloria erit] in being in virtue of such effects.

 

On the Strange Afterlife of Kant (the Antinomies) in Analytical Philosophy/metaphysics; some reflections on our methods

There are two mutually reinforcing founding myths in analytical philosophy: the one centered on Cambridge, England, tells the story of how G.E. Moore and Russell liberated us from the unintelligibility and inflated metaphysical pretensions of British Idealism by the application of common sense and conceptual decomposition aided by Frege's new mathematical logic that the young were using to dismantle the cowwebs of intellectual dinosaurs (like Bradley). The other is centered on Vienna, where in the aftermath of Einstein's overthrowing of Newtonian physics, it was understood that Kantian philosophy (with outdated commitments on space, time, causation, etc.) was untenable and (with help from Wittgenstein) forged a powerful program that mixed logical acumen, again indebted to Frege, and respect for the sciences, even Enlightenment values. From the vantage point of these two narratives, the ongoing attractiveness of transcendental philosophy and species of idealism within Continental philosophy is a kind of intellectual embarrassment--hadn't they heard the news -- one might ask paraphrasing Nietzsche -- of the death of  Kantianism?*

Yes, such myth(s) is no history, but during the last few months, in reflecting on the inexorable march of (knee-jerk realist) metaphysics within analytical philosophy, and the hardening of attitudes toward anyone willing to doubt the solidity of Moorean facts (despite the existence of widespread semantic and pschological illusions discovered by way of the sciences), I have started to wonder about the following question:

What happened to the antinomies in the rise of analytical philosophy?

For, the antinomies, diagnosed by Kant, do not go away just because Kant got physics wrong. In fact, while the new logic is a fantastic tool, it also gave rise to new logical antinomies (starting with Russell's paradox and rediscovery of very old ones, e.g., The Liar).

Of course, the logical antinomies stimulated extraordinary fertile, ongoing attempts to develop logic(s) in ways that circumvent even clarify these antinomies. So, rather than ignoring the antinomies they can present research opportunities either by acting as known constraints or as obstacles to be overcome. Reflecting on this history made me see analytical philosophy in a different light.**

For, one can understand the methods of analytical as responsive to the threat the antinomies pose. Here's a rough and ready taxonomy:

The first, and dominant, approach is to espouse a systematic caution that expresses itself in various ways within the analytic tradition: by this I do not just mean the obsession with rigor and clarity, nor a certain ponderousness about the mundane (e.g., ordinary language philosophy) but also a certain self-limitation on what can be expressed.+ In Carnap, this is exhibited in a fondness for precise, engineered languages, or frameworks, and a suspicion of questions that are external (or optative) to these frameworks. In Quine, it entails deference to a suitably regimented language that collects the findings of science. In both there is, despite the best efforts of Stebbing, also a mistrust of metaphysics as such.

Of course, in Lewis the caution is methodological in that any philosophical system has to find some optimal cost-benefit equilibrium between common sense intuitions and theoretical desiderata and is to be expressed in some final-physics language (for a more careful presentation of the conservativism in Lewis's program see here). To this day, some analytical metaphysicians discuss their projects in terms of the ontological/ideological features of a hypothetical, ideal language at the end of the progress of science.

These examples of systematic caution all respect the challenge the antinomies pose without having to address them and even without having to be aware of them. (If it turns out that my historical speculations cannot be substantiated in the record, I can always say  that I am putting my finger on -- to borrow a phrase of Dennett's --free-floating rationales without representation.) Such systematic caution connects with another familiar fact of analytical philosophy: its focus on puzzle-solving rather than systematizing. (Analytical philosophy has always rewarded specialization rather than breadth [recall].) The advantage of this kind specialization and precision is not just enhanced focus and skill at puzzle-solving, but one also avoids bumping up against antinomies that would reveal themselves if one were forced to systematize. (As an aside, this may help explain some of the status-hierarchies within philosophy: a flatter hierarchy among areas of specialization runs the risk of accidentally  generating the kind of systematicity that would generate awareness of antinomies.)

Of course, while the Kantianism in Carnap, even Kuhn, is now well-established, a second approach is to be found in other analytical philosophers, who explicitly reverted back to structural features of Kant’s philosophy most notably Strawson at Oxford. Strawson's ‘descriptive metaphysics’ is a metaphysics of what (that other important Kantian), Sellars at Pittsburgh, would call the ‘manifest image’ of ordinary life not fundamental reality. The widespread interest in normativity reminds us of the enduring vitality of this approach.

The third method is to treat philosophical systems as (revisable) inferences to the best explanation in which one appeals to theory-world fit in light of a variety of scientific virtues. In principle, this approach need not respect the threat of the antinomies (despite its origin in Pierce's philosophy), if it remains focused on relatively isolated topics. Those that advance it also advocate the disciplining (Williamson's term) of philosophy by constraining it in light of the demands of, say, some formal system. This piggy-backs on the ways in which the logical antinomies have been deflected and tamed. The downside of this approach is that one's philosophical commitments get blackboxed in one's formal apparatus.

So, here's a prediction: as analytical philosophers are emboldened to get ever more systematic and to bring the problems of cosmology, consciousness, and axiology, including politics, into their collective orbits, the antinomies will reappear in modern guise, especially if they are using inference to the best explanation in each individual area or topic.++

 

On Intellectual Decline

In Mach, of course. we have a classic case of this abusive empiricism. It is a case that also exemplifies a characteristic tendency. a kind of Nemesis, of what we might call "hypercritical" philosophic theories-theories that lay down methodological standards or criteria which are actually impossible to practice. The tendency is to lose, at crucial junctures. basic critical control of the conceptual process.--Howard Stein (1977) "Some Philosophical Pre-History of Relativity," 14.

This time I quote Stein's judgment on Mach not to discuss the varieties of empiricism (recall), despite Stein's tempting characterization of 'abusive empiricism.' (Stein's searching, critical treatment of Mach's famous criticism of the bucket experiment is deservedly legendary.) Rather, in Stein Mach is exemplarary of a certain kind of philosophical (and scientific) vice. Amusingly, Stein diagnosis an analogous vice in historiographic practice: 

For the avoidance of anachronism, it is neither necessary nor sufficient to restrict one's conceptual vocabulary to that of the period under discussion. To impose such a restriction is to inhibit flexibility of thought without any important compensating guarantee against error. It is an intellectual stratagem analogous to that of the shallow empiricism in science, that seeks security in rules for the construction of concepts, and achieves only a hobbling of theory. Stein, 14.

It is hard to read (or re-read) Stein's paper and not be struck by the live possibility of intellectual decline even in a topic -- discerning the structure of nature guided by developments in physics -- where the underlying science is advancing. (Thus, reminding us, that philosophy is not easy.) Despite lacking an adequate mathematical vocabulary,* Huygens and Newton are exhibited as having surer footing in their conceptual analysis than many that have followed them (through the nineteenth century) as well as those with a higher philosophical reputation (e.g., Leibniz). Stein's historical account is not exhaustive, but the point about the decline in insight can be defended. 

Stein is not a declinist; he makes no claim that intellectual decline is necessary, or to be expected. Moreover, decline is not inevitable (in Stein's account Riemann and Einstein recover lost insights).  Stein's diagnosis of the source of decline is what may be call ideological; later thinkers lose the secure path because they end up in the grip of intellectual commitments that block insight.* In addition to Newton's tendency at terseness in expression, we can add lack of transparency as a further reason in the case that Stein describes; not all of Huygens most insightful observations were fully available to later thinkers buried as they were in notebooks and correspondence. 

Of course, if absent, say, the inquisition, general economic depression, warfare, inadequate scientific education, one age can decline on a certain metaphysical reflection (and the generations after Newton and Huygens included brilliant minds -- a string of Bernoullis, Diderot, Euler, D'Alembert, Wolff, Du Châtelet, Maupertuis, etc.  --), then other ages of philosophical decline on some dimension or another are also possible. For example, Harry Frankfurt is convinced that the age of giants is over, and we have entered an age of decline ("the field is quiet. We seem, more or less, to be marking time.") 

By contrast (to Frankfurt), regular readers of my musings know that I broke with my own (lazy naturalist) education in the philosophy of science, and have come to think that until David Lewis reintroduced quite modest [modest because largely modular] systematic considerations, much twentieth century analytical philosophy is a philosophical waste-land despite the brilliant distinctions and the non-trivial conceptual (and formal) innovations of the period (which turned out to be fertile for other sciences); the reputations of many third and fourth generation analytical philosophers are overblown, despite often endless praise ("eminent," "distinguished," "brilliant," etc.), their work exhibiting lack of durability and systematic robustness (recall). 

In a puzzle-solving, abductive regime, results are -- at regular pace with lots of hard labor -- cheap. (Of course, they can generate quite a number of success goods to the puzzler who gets there first or most elegantly; or has enough students to keep citing him, etc.) But in such a regime the concepts are not really stress-tested until they are taken up in empirical or technological sciences (as happened with formal semantics, computing theory, game theory, and a wide variety of philosophical concepts in psychology and linguistics etc.). That is to say, and to reiterate, puzzle-solving regimes can be extremely fertile for the special sciences; that's compatible with decline in other respects, especially absent systematic, durable background theory. Lewis re-opened the search for that elusive prey. (Sadly, many Lewisians are far narrower in range than he was.) Stein reminds us that this search must be tempered with ongoing sensitivity to how scientifically stress-tested-concepts (see this paper by Stone) bear on experience.

The Classic Put-Down (and being Out of Date); Williamson on Recent History (III)

The compositionality constraint exerted a powerful force in the direction of systematicity. In practice, the only semantic theories to exhibit (rather than merely claim) such a compositional structure were those for formally specified languages. Without such a formal semantics, a philosophy of language looked badly undeveloped to new wavers. It was partly for this reason that Austin was barely mentioned in Oxford philosophy of language by 1973, since he had no formal semantics to offer. The same went for his protégé and in some respects intellectual heir John Searle, whose major work Speech Acts looked out of date from an Oxford perspective almost as soon as it was published in 1969. Timothty Williamson  “How Did We Get Here From There?” (20)

“How Did We Get Here From There?”

Williamson's core intellectual vice is not his parochialism (recall), but that he confuses technical sophistication with philosophical significance; this leads to a certain amount of disfiguring small-mindedness (as exemplified in his remark on Searle). He writes as if there is a research-frontier in professional philosophy and if you are not on it, then you're not in the game.+ (This may be true from the perspective of modern grant agencies, but I ignore them here.) I write the previous sentences without much fondness for Searle's philosophical projects and with considerable admiration for Williamson's achievements. But even if we grant Williamson his authoritative judgment, it is striking that in his put-down, he cannot pause to note the accomplishments of Searle's Speech Acts, which has been astonishingly influential (with close to 20,000 citations according to Scholar.Google),++ including on many worthy non-philosophical and normative projects (something not quite on Williamson's radar-screen).

While one should always defend the intrinsic worth of un-applied philosophy, there is no need to be contemptuous of the many ways in which somewhat-non-cutting-edge-philosophical-tools can have up-take within and outside philosophy. It's not as if Williamson has any philosophical resources to argue otherwise--his justification of formal philosophy is -- not unlike Carnap's -- ultimately consequentialist.* From that vantage point a dated tool that can be used is better than an advanced bit of machinery without use.

If being on the technical cutting edge were decisive in philosophy, then we would have been Platonists (yea!) with Gödel a long time ago. More seriously, if being on the cutting edge of the technical research-frontier is the key mark of philosophical success then Alonzo Church (with his students) was the seminal philosopher of the (middle of the) twentieth century; sadly, Church goes unmentioned in Williamson's story. (So does Gödel.) More important, some works are nowhere near the cutting edge, yet they can generate enduring and insightful philosophical projects. From the vantage point of Eudoxus, Plato looks like a bungler; Leibniz is obviously technically superior to and the better philosopher than Locke (and just about anybody else to have ever lived). Yet, it's not just in political philosophy that Leibniz does not hold a candle to Locke (nor Hobbes). On the same theme: if Euler had read Hume, he would have thought him an amateur, but -- as much as I love Euler -- Hume did grasp philosophical problems in a way that eluded Euler. (It's not impossible Euler did think of Kant as a bungler.) Stebbing will remain a role-model long after Dummett is forgotten. Nietzsche is not a very impressive philosopher of physics, but there are enduring reasons for why Carnap embraces him in the midst of his polemics with Heidegger (see Stone here and Sachs here for discussion).

The previous paragraph is not an argument to stay ignorant of technical developments. (Just because my systematicity is informal, it does not mean I don't recognize a better route for others.) But one important reason for the recurring pattern, that the non-technical-whizz-kids-can-contribute-to-philosophy's progress, is that as long as there are no Philosopher-Kings, the call to philosophy is not exhausted by technical problems with given constraints; we are, as of yet, far removed from being an engineering science. Another reason is that good philosophical judgment is not a consequence of technical skill.** (This is why Bradley's judgment is still quotable by Williamson despite Russell's many purported technical knock-out blows and Ayer's cheap shots.) There is also a third reason that is related to the nature of twentieth century analytical philosophy: it was, with one non-trivial exception, not systematic enough. Without full systematicity, even the most formally sophisticated philosophical project is unprotected from its own arbitrary commitments. I'll try to explain this last, undoubtedly cryptic remark in my final post on Williamson's essay, which -- despite being 'informal and unsystematic' (8) -- has quite a bit to say about systematicity, soon.

Winners and Losers in Philosophy; Williamson on Recent History of Philosophy (II)

History is often said to be written by the winners. In the case of analytic philosophy, however, there is a danger that history will be written predominantly by the losers. One reason is that analytic philosophy is a somewhat anti-historical tradition, especially where it most resembles a science, in aspiration or achievement. For there it tends to be oriented towards the future rather than the past, in the manner of a science – hardly surprising when progress is expected. Those who do not like history cannot complain when their history is written by people who are not like them. A second reason is that recent analytic philosophy seems to subvert the global narratives it might otherwise be tempting to tell about the history of the subject – most notably, in the resurgence of realist metaphysics, often unashamedly concerned with things in themselves. For those sympathetic to Kant or Wittgenstein or Dewey, it must be tempting to see much recent analytic philosophy as an insignificant anomaly, a passing throwback, in the long march of philosophy.--Timothy Williamson,

“How Did We Get Here From There?”

“How Did We Get Here From There?” (33)

As noted yesterday, Williamson's receptivity toward history appears to represent a change of heart. It is notable that the reasons he offers to do philosophical history are not themselves, well, philosophical. Rather, while he still thinks that philosophy is scientific enough to be progressive, he now thinks it is dangerous to decouple the present from the discipline's history. The danger he correctly seems to discern is that history is written by those that reject the status quo. Even so, Williamson's imagination deserts him because he only seems to recognize one kind of dimension on the status quo: you either represent the vengeful 'losers,'' and, thereby, probably mistakenly -- because of a lack of technical competence -- buy into a global narrative at odds with the philosophical present, or you represent, the technically more competent, 'winners' who embrace the status quo.

 

For Williamson the mission of history is to explain the internal -- as it were, causal sequence -- development of a series of doctrinal as well as methodological disputes and technical innovations that can explain how the philosophical status quo (as represented by, well Williamson in the Lewisian-era) came about from some arbitrary starting point. Interestingly enough, the starting point is given by unnamed "opponents of analytical philosophy" (7)--the very first words of the article!

 

In fact, one can welcome the status quo, write history that is philosophically competent and yet be distrustful of the narratives we tell ourselves. For these narratives may efface not just figures from the past, but also historical resources that can help us improve on the status quo. Let's grant -- for the sake of argument -- Williamson his claim that philosophy is like a normal, progressive science (with a commitment to abduction and in which theoretical disputes are adjudicated with appeal to theoretical virtue); then the unfolding of philosophy will generate Kuhn losses along the way. The philosophical history of philosophy would then be committed to recovering lost insights that may help improve the path forward from the status quo. Williamson's recognition that Bradley was not all wrong about the role of metaphysics in motivating anti-metaphysics is a nice case in point. It is, after all, no surprise that some of the most exciting contributions to recent work in history of philosophy are by Jonathan Schaffer, Michael Della Rocca, and analytical feminists like Eileen O'Neill (and those of us inspired by them), all of whom present new large-scale narratives without much fondness for Kant and Kantianism. Recovery projects simultaneously fill-the-gaps and allow us to imagine alternative futures to the present status-quo.

 

Of course, Williamson's own narrative undermines the idea that philosophy is akin to a mature science. He recognizes "the power of fashion in philosophy." (34) Now, in this piece, he aims to defuse the observation, by insisting that philosophy is relevantly akin to mathematics (which he claims is also fashion-driven). One need not be a Kuhnian to recognize that Williamson has few resources to marshall against the person who, accepting that philosophy aims to be scientific, points at the same phenomenon and argues that this is evidence that philosophy is in a pre-paradigmatic stage.* 

 

In a pre-paradigmatic stage, losers can hope to regroup and fight another day. For example, just a generation ago, 'friends-of-Carnap,' who chafed under a Quine-ean orthodoxy, united in a then-marginal intellectual society (HOPOS: History of the Philosophy of Science) to help nurture a better appreciation of Carnap's enduring contribution to philosophy. They did so both by providing a better understanding of the Kantian, Nietzschean, and logical roots of Carnap's philosophy and by articulating the ongoing virtues of the Carnapian program as well as by encouraging new Carnapian projects that have vindicated the original faith. If you don't like the previous example, consider the fate of McTaggart--sadly unmentioned by Williamson; once thought outdated in light of Quine's technical sophistication on ontology, yet his way of framing the issues in the metaphysics of time has endured (for good and ill).  

 

I close with a methodological (that I then use to make a new point and reinforce my philosophical-historical claims) observation: that opponents of a tradition (as analytical philosophy is) have a stereotypical, perhaps even misleading, image of a tradition is no surprise. For such an image to be effective rhetorically and even intellectually, it must contain enough grains of truth, but the work it does is designed to de-legitimate an opposing approach. In this case the image also has plenty of resonance within analytical philosophy in the ways it conceived and taught itself from the 1950s onward. This self-understanding is often captured by a succession of names Carnap-Quine-Kripke-Lewis (both [recall] by those within analytical philosophy that contest the received interpretation [see Price] and those like Putnam that wish to insert themselves into the tradition).

 

Now, when images and concepts are contested one ought to be alert. For example, even in the early ages of analytical philosophy some central players (not the least Russell) had non-trivial metaphysical aspirations. Once alerted to this, one can recognize other previously forgotten metaphysical projects within analytical philosophy (e.g., Stebbing [recall]). Stebbing was taken to have 'lost' the debate with Max Black, but as I have argued, history may well judge otherwise. (Certainly Stebbing's vision of a public role for analytical philosophy is now warmly being embraced by all kinds of figures.)**

 

In fact, Williamson himself admirably broadens the standard story considerably; he pays serious attention to the roles of Cook Wilson, A.N. Prior, and Strawson. Of these three, Wilson and Prior are not really analytical philosophers. Prior has been so assimilated, but he himself insisted that historical commentary was a key philosophical enterprise (something that certainly does not fit Williamson's understanding of analytical philosophy). Outside of formal logic, one of Prior's main contributions to present metaphysics (see the work by Jessica Wilson) is the influential restatement of W.E. Johnson's distinction between Determinates and Determinables. Johnson (neither an Idealist nor an analytical philosopher) is commonly effaced in narratives that insist that analytical philosophy successfully rebelled against British Idealism and vanquished it.  

 

Isaiah Berlin's Criticism of Cassirer

[Due to technical problems this post appears a few days late--ES]

With this special sensitivity to concealed connections and affinities, for transitions and cross currents, went [A] a rooted distaste for sharp delineation and the drawing of firm distinctions between ideas and thinkers. Cassirer's tendency was [B] to conciliate and appease, [C] to see  the past in the future and the future in the past, to represent the philosophy of the Renaissance....in such a fashion that later developments - those of the eighteenth and nineteenth, and even of the twentieth centuries were all too visible, almost fully formed, in these early beginnings. He liked to think of Leibniz as a kind of early Kant and of Kant (whom he all but worshiped) as almost a modern physicist; of Descartes or Lessing or Hegel as all, in their various ways, seeking to express one large single truth; all thinkers were to him loyal fellow-workers, engaged in a vast, common enterprise; the differences between them in Cassirer's pages became relatively blurred; the harmony between them covered a multitude of ephemeral disagreements, progressively less significant as the horizon widened...like all  efforts at conciliation, it can only be achieved at some sacrifice of the critical faculty.--Isaiah Berlin Reviewing Cassirer's The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, in English Historical Review 68 (1953), 617-19.

Joshua Cherniss called my attention to Berlin's review during facebook discussion after yesterday's post; I am grateful to him for making a copy of it available to me. In the quoted passage, Berlin's "appeasement" -- a word that had become toxic in 1953 -- reveals something of the intensity of Berlin's critical attitude that follows the quoted passage. In particular, the core criticisms of Cassirer (1874-1945), who was already dead at the time of the review, are political and philosophical. So,  for example, Berlin call's Cassirer's book "politically timid," and it is by no  means clear that in granting that "the book as a whole remains lucid, civilized and agreeable," Berlin means to be offering a compliment.

That even the lucidity is not a compliment is clear from the closing lines of the review, where Berlin calls for more "business-like...that is, ice-cutting" approach. In fact, Berlin distinguishes between different kinds of clarity in the review, and he embraces the values of the then surging, analytical movement with which he was very familiar (and of which he would become a fierce critic); Berlin wants the clarity that is subsequent to fine-grained and "firm distinctions" and the pulling apart of atomic concepts from what might have seemed like an organic whole.

One need not be a friend of political timidity, or even Cassirer's "supremely innocent" philosophy, to be weary of Berlin's rejection of conciliation. For, it entails open-ended warfare (and the desire for total victory); that is, in his criticism of Cassirer, Berlin here comes awfully close to embracing the philosophy of Carl Schmitt and shares with it a disdain for harmony. To embrace such open-ended warfare is uncivilized; if by civilization we mean the art of keeping conversation going, then even appeasement can play a tactical role in advancing civilization and conciliation. This art is not very demanding and requires all our "critical faculties," including the self-command not to investigate, say, 'ephemeral disagreements' in the middle of a crisis; it also requires the ability to make careful distinctions in order to find tenuous common ground, especially when confronted with "mysticism and fanaticism" in others.

This is not the place to discuss what it meant for the philosophical interpretations of the unfolding cold war that Cassirer's philosophical project was unfairly coupled with Chaimberlain's disgraced politics.* Michael Friedman has already eloquently argued (in a different context) that by reducing the philosophical option-space to the more radical approaches represented by Carnap vs Heidegger, philosophy has been diminished.

It is, in fact, it is by no means obvious that Cassirer gets the thinkers of the Enlightenment wrong in thinking that (to quote Berlin again) that they were engaged in a joint project of building "the great cathedral of human culture and learning" with few "really profound differences of principle." As one of Berlin's intellectual lodestones, Benjamin Constant, argued, it is not wrong in so far as this seems to have been a guiding aspiration of many of the leading figures themselves nor unfair in light of the judgment of posterity, which they eagerly hoped would vindicate them. Even Jonathan Israel has to acknowledge that for much of the eighteenth century the so-called moderate and radical Enlighteners appeared as part of a united effort, despite huge disagreements over tactics and philosophies (for some qualification see here).

So, while my own commitments tend to be not far removed from Berlin's, I reject Berlin's linking of his political criticisms of Cassirer with his disagreement over philosophical method captured by [A-C] in the quoted passage at the top of this post. In fact, while I am no friend of Cassirer's historical epistemology nor his dynamics of reason (nor a worshiper of Kant), I do defend the legitimacy of [C], that is, to see the past in the future and the future in the past. Now in Cassirer the point is to articulate the ways in which "one large single truth" may be expressed.

For, the idea that one's philosophical efforts are, in part, realized or even more richly captured in later work guides nearly all our scholarly efforts; it's a regulative ideal that is presupposed in lots of academic activity--from publishing in learned journals, to citation practices, to archiving, to giving of honors and prizes, etc. (There are, of course, more narcissist philosophical projects that do not require the participation of others; some of these may, in fact, be beautiful to behold by outsiders.) The ideal follows from the realization that philosophy is very difficult and our time on earth relatively brief. While we engage in our puzzles and are fully absorbed in various programs, we need some to step back and figure out how all of these belong to the larger whole that we aim to capture.** From the vantage point of that larger whole much of what we do is foreshadowed by those born before us. It does not follow, of course, that one should always look for prior developments and only stress agreement, but, uncharacteristically, Berlin fails to recognize that widening one's horizons is a species of courage and that a steadfast resistance to a rising tide of pessimism is a species of magnanimity.